This invention relates to a dry, flour based dietetic cookie mix that utilizes fructose as a natural sweetener. It is free of ordinary sugar, egg yolks and artificial sweeteners.
Dietetic and, especially, diabetic baked dessert foods, such as cookies, chronically suffer from poor taste, most notably from insufficient sweetness. The term "dietetic foods" means those foods prepared and formulated especially for those persons on special diets, such as, for example, low cholesterol and sugar free diets.
Sweeteners, including ordinary sugar (sucrose), saccharin, cyclamates, and sorbitol, and their combinations, all have some sort of undesirable attributes, especially from a diabetic standpoint, including after-taste, objectionable taste, side effects and potential harm to human health. For example, for some people saccharin has an unpleasant bitter metallic after-taste and has recently been suspected as a carcinogen. Sorbitol has only about one half the sweetness of sucrose, but when consumed in fairly large quantities can cause some people to suffer gastric discomfort and diarrhea. Sucrose must be used in such large amounts in order to impart the desired degree of sweetness that the product contains too many calories to make it suitable for consumption by persons on a diet. Further, sucrose is quickly metabolized, requiring insulin, which makes it generally unsuitable for diabetic use.
It has not to my knowledge been heretofore possible to provide an acceptable degree of sweetness in a dietetic cookie without using non-nutritive artificial sweeteners, such as saccharin and cyclamates. My U.S. Pat. No. 3,658,553 describes the use of a combination of sorbitol (a nutritive sweetener) and saccharin in a dietary dry cake mix.
In recent years, some nutritionists and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have from time to time expressed concern about the use of sorbitol, saccharin and cyclamates as food sweeteners, either alone or in combination with nutritive sweeteners. Such concern by the FDA has resulted in cyclamates being banned, although there has been considerable debate over the medical basis for this action. The major concern expressed about saccharin and cyclamates is whether they are detrimental to human health if consumed in large quantities over a long time.
In contrast to saccharin and cyclamates, fructose is a naturally occurring nutritive sweetener. It is a carbohydrate and has the same amount of calories per unit weight as another natural sugar, sucrose. Accordingly, it is believed to be as safe for human consumption as any natural food. Fructose tastes like ordinary common sugar, but is approximately 50 percent sweeter than sucrose and 150% sweeter than sorbitol. In fact, fructose is the sweetest natural sugar known. This relatively high level of sweetness allows less fructose to be required in many products with a corresponding reduction in sugar derived calories of about 20-80 percent. However, this is not true in products subjected to heat as fructose rearranges into a less sweet form when heated. Fructose varies in sweetness depending on temperature, time, acidity and use. In heated products, fructose is generally in a less sweet form and in unheated products, it is in a sweeter form.
Compared to common sugar, fructose enters the blood stream at a relatively slow rate. In addition fructose absorption, unlike that of either glucose or galactose, does not stimulate either glucagon from the gut or insulin from the pancreas. These and related properties are believed to enable fructose to be utilized in the body metabolism without having an adverse effect on glucose metabolism by which blood sugar is assimulated and metabolized into the body utilizing insulin. For these and other reasons which are not fully understood, studies have shown that fructose can be used in moderate amounts in the diet of persons having mild or well balanced diabetes without deleterious effects.
The relatively slow rate that fructose is absorbed and metabolized in the liver enhances the desirability of its use by the persons on a special diet since glucose is thereby released into the blood stream more evenly over an extended period of time to naturally control hunger.
Finally, because fructose is sweeter than common sugar, in some applications it can be used in smaller, more moderate, quantities in diets to provide the desired degree of sweetness with a corresponding reduction in the amount of sugar derived calories.